100 - Mockup poster against a wall using Photoshop

Hi there, this video we're going to learn some techniques to make this mock-up. It's not really a special, like, just add mock-up button. So we kind of build it out of some blurry triangles and some Drop Shadows. Some more triangles, just a big rectangle, and it looks pretty believable. So let's work through how to make this now in Photoshop.

Let's get started, we're going to create a new document. Use anything you like, maybe Print, I'm going to use US Letter, do a Landscape. Click 'Create'. Let's bring in the image that we want to mock up. I'm going to mock up, so I'm going to go to 'File', 'Place Embedded'. I'm going to use one from your 'Exercise Files' called 'Mockups', it's called 'Red'. Remember our Red type poster? I'm going to mock that up. Probably needed to do a bigger version of it. First up, we're going to pick a background color. Easiest way to color the background is to pick a color. Say foreground color, double click it here. Slide through, find a color that you want to work with. I want something like that. Then hold down the 'Option-Backspace' key. If you're on a PC it's 'Alt- Backspace'.

Now this video here, there's nothing special about it, it's using tools that we've used before, but I know sometimes it's easier to see somebody else to do it, and you're like, "Yeah." So I guess that's what we're doing here, it's nothing like phenomenally amazing you've never seen before, it's just different combinations of it. So we're going to kind of fake the table top. So we're going to use the Rectangle Tool. I'm going to pick a color that's just slightly lighter than what I had before, so just dragging it a little bit this way. I'm going to give it a Fill color of that. And the Stroke, it's going to have no Stroke. We just need to have it so the table is just a little bit underneath our image. So it looks like this poster is sitting on top. And I'm totally not happy with that color, so I'm going to click on it. Go back to the original. Click on this little rainbow thing here and lighten it up. Lighten it up is getting too pink for me so what I'm going to do is, with the background, I'm going to change that color. Darken that up. I think I'm not happy with the color still, but we can change that later on using Hue & Saturation.

So ignoring my terrible color choices, let's use the Pin Tool. Even if you have never used the Pin Tool before what we're going to do is, draw out a black, so we're going to make sure, Pin Tool, we switch it to 'Shape'. We're going to pick a Fill color of black. Don't have that layer selected, I'm going to undo. Let's click off into no man's land, this means I've got no layer selected. Now if I use the Pin Tool, and I go to Fill, and I go to black, it's not going to recolor the thing I had selected. So Fill, no Stroke, I'm going to draw a triangle that kind of starts there. Jumps down past the back of the table. Comes away in here as well, don't try and run it up the edge, you'll end up seeing the edges of the triangle when we blur it. I want it to be behind the table. And now just want to blur it, you can use any kind of blur.

So this is going to be 'Blur Top'. The blur I find most useful is under 'Blur Gallery', and it's called the 'Irish Blur'. It says, I'm going to convert it to a Smart Object; thank you very much. You end up in this own little world. And Irish Blur is cool, what happens is you've got a kind of a center that's not blurry. And as it goes out, can you see it gets blurrier and blurrier. So what I want to do is have it-- I want the whole thing blurry. So I kind of want to find, maybe put this here and just rearrange the edges here, by clicking and dragging them to find something that I like. You can rotate it as well by grabbing any of these dots. So this is what I'm looking for, I'm looking for something that's sharp. So blurry, but not super blurry. As it gets down gets blurrier, and blurrier, and blurrier.

What we can also do is drag this around to extreme it up a little bit. Come in a bit. Even blurrier. Move it around. I'm happy with that, I'm going to click 'OK'. We edited it out. How long that took? This thing was spinning for a while doing the blur. Just in case yours is doing it as well. Next thing I want to do is, it depends-- we've got a straight color so we can just play around with the opacity, just to get it down to where we want. You might find though that if you've got say a textured background, you might want to play with different Blending Modes to get it to blend nicely with the background. Let's say we're happy with that, let's do the other triangle here on the table. Similar process. Just one little extra change, so 'Pin Tool', it's going to go past and over the table.

So the Pin Tool is-- we're just clicking once. Make sure it comes back into here because if you blur it on the edges here, you start seeing the kind of lighter pink coming through. So I want it in front of the table, and I want to blur it, 'Filter'. Blur Gallery's not working, I got to go back to my Move Tool, because I'm halfway through building it with the Pin Tool. Didn't like that, so 'Filter', 'Blur Gallery', 'Irish Blur'. 'Convert to Smart Object'; thank you. I'm going to crank up the outside. Instead of dragging this around you can just drag it over here. You can see, if I drag it up, it's sliding. I feel like the front guy needs to be less blurry than this wafty thing in the back here. And then, again, just dragging it around to position it where it's a little blurry at the beginning but quite blurry at the outside. Click 'OK'. That worked a whole lot faster. And to make this one work we need to twirl that up just so you can see a bit easier. We're going to clip this to the background here. We've done that a few times now, remember, holding 'Option', just find the gap in between and give it a click. On a PC its 'Alt'. You are so getting sick of me explaining every single shortcut every single time. I know, but it's repetition, some people just need it a million times. I hope you're not offended.

And now it's lowering the opacity to something at least believable. I feel like it should be lighter than the background. Just play around with it, I don't know, what do you think? Something else I might do is, I want there to be a little bit of a gradient coming out from behind this table. So I'm going to make a new layer just above it. Actually just behind it. This is going to be my gradient. I'm going to grab my Gradient Tool. I'm going to use my foreground color as black. I'm going to use the second option here, it goes black to transparent. What we do is we click, hold, and drag to kind of add a gradient. Now if you hold 'Shift' while you drag it, it goes perfect straight lines. So holding 'Shift', click and drag down past here. Then I'm going to lower the opacity, just tapping my number keys on my keyboard. I'm on my Move Tool, just going to give me a bit of a shadow.

If there wasn't enough shadows I'm going to give this a kind of a white frame just for no reason. With this layer selected, 'fx', I'm going to add a 'Stroke'. Now Stroke, yours is probably set to center. I can't remember what it is by default, but inside is going to give you a nice crisp edge. Decide on how thick you want it. While I'm also here I'm going to add a Drop Shadow. What kind of Drop Shadow? Not that big, or that fuzzy. Just want like a little baby one. Can you see what I'm doing there? Lower the opacity. Preview on, preview off, actually let's click 'OK'. It's just turned the shadow on and off. Just a little thing so it's got a little bit of something going on at the bottom there. You can never ever have too many Drop Shadows.

And that is our mock-up fake. Cool thing about this, remember, it's a Smart Object, we can update it. It is nothing special or new, but just kind of, I guess, combining the things we've learned in a different kind of project, which I think can be helpful. Let's get into a different mock-up technique in the next video.